From babyhood to adulthood, children are exposed to many forms of violence, no matter where they live.
Black adolescent boys in the United States are 19 times more likely to die than white boys of the same age, and face a similar risk of dying as their peers in the conflict zones of South Sudan. Latin America and the Caribbean have the highest child murder rates in the world. Around 300 million two-to-four-year-olds globally will experience physical punishment or verbal abuse by their parents or caretakers. And at least 15 million girls will have been sexually abused or raped by their 19th birthdays.
These are just some of the alarming findings of two wide-ranging global reports on violence against children. Both reports point to two major challenges: getting countries to gather better data on the various types of violence against children, which so often happens inside the home and/or by people known to the children, and taking steps to put an end to it.
There are still big gaps in knowledge, with many countries completely in the dark about the extent to which their child citizens are victims of violence. Even countries with better statistics have no idea how much corporal punishment happens in homes for example, or of the extent to which boys experience physical and sexual violence. All too often, violence against children is shrouded in secrecy.
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Know Violence in Childhood, a global initiative to end violence against children, released a detailed report informed by 44 research papers, thousands of articles, reports and other sources. Although the report presents a global picture, the authors state that “reliable data on inter-personal violence in childhood are difficult to obtain. This is partly because such violence takes place within relationships and is hidden by a strong culture of silence”. And many children and women are reluctant to report violence because of the stigma and fear of repercussions.
UNICEF’s report, A Familiar Face: Violence in the Lives of Children and Adolescents, builds on their seminal 2014 report on child violence statistics, Hidden in Plain Sight, which compiled data from 190 countries. Their new report contains updated statistics and analysis and notes that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include targets to wipe out violence against children by 2030, offer the potential get better data on the crimes, ensure that monitoring takes place, that countries are held to account and most importantly, that they take proactive steps to stop it.
Although much more information is now available on violence against children than it was a few years ago, the gaps make it hard to compare countries with each other and for states to report and measure their progress on the SDGs.
Goal 5 (gender equality) and Goal 16 (peace) contain specific targets aimed at stopping violence against children but many of the other goals indirectly address some of the drivers of this violence too, including poverty, lack of education and poor health.
Nevertheless, if more progress is not made and if current trends continue, “close to two million children and adolescents could be killed by an act of violence by the year 2030”, warn the authors of the UNICEF report. And whether violence ends in death or not, the effects of pervasive and various forms of abuse throughout childhood have an insidious impact on society in general, says Know Violence Global Co-Chair A.K. Shiva Kumar.
“From severe physical punishment to sexual abuse to homicide, childhood violence damages individuals, families and communities in both rich countries and poor, with a cost in trillions of dollars a year.”
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Violence against children is closely tied up with violence against women. Children who see their mothers abused will more likely perpetrate violence themselves, warn the experts.
Childhood violence occurs in many forms – corporal punishment in the home and at school; physical, sexual and emotional abuse by adults or peers.
“Beyond the immediate physical damage it causes, exposure to violence can traumatize children, harm school performance, lead to depression and other illnesses, and increase the chances that young people will become the victims or perpetrators of violence in the future,” say the Know Violence in Childhood authors.
The UNICEF report cites an emerging body of research that shows the toxic effects of violence and other trauma on the developing brains of children in the first 1,000 days of their lives.
Violence not only threatens children’s physical safety but their cognitive and emotional development too. This is particularly disturbing given that data from 30 countries showed that nearly half of all one-to-two-year-olds were verbally abused or received corporal punishment.
Online violence is another emerging category of violence as more and more children around the world gain access to the Internet. Online bullying, harassment, sexual extortion and “grooming” for sex and child pornography are now the shadow side of increasing interconnectedness between children and their peers or with adult strangers, including those in far-flung parts of the globe.
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Yet there is still a great deal of public ignorance about the many forms of violence that children experience. According to the UNICEF report, “Despite a growing awareness of the global nature of violence against children, the misconception that it is relatively rare persists. Media reporting typically focuses on extreme cases, such as death or rape. And while such tragedies, thankfully, are relatively uncommon, other acts of violence are not.” The authors also conclude that two out of three violent acts against children and adolescents are inter-personal rather than a result of broader conflict or civil unrest.
Although both reports make the point that violence happens across all economic strata, in rich and poor countries, low-income and high-income families, three regions in Africa nevertheless take the top three spots in tables compiled by Know Violence in Childhood for 2015: West and Central Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, and Middle East and North Africa. These regions have the highest combined totals for the following categories: corporal punishment; bullying and physical fights; physical and sexual violence against girls; and child homicide. Although Latin America and the Caribbean have the highest rate of child murder, the other forms of violence are far lower in these regions. Industrialized countries have the lowest rates of all these categories combined. Another statistic shows that sexual violence against girls is worst in Eastern and Southern Africa, followed by West and Central Africa and Middle East and North Africa.
So what steps do experts recommend for taking steps to end the many forms of violence against children? As UNICEF says, “It will take individual and collective action to right this global wrong.” Measures must be taken at state, community and inter-personal levels, say the experts. Outlawing violence is a first step. So far, only 60 of 193 UN member states prohibit corporal punishment in the home. In schools, corporal punishment is either partly or fully illegal in roughly 130 countries.
Other steps include addressing the socio-economic conditions that perpetuate the violence such as unemployment, poverty, substance abuse and the like. And hopefully the SDGs will help build public awareness and pressure countries to come on board with clear efforts to prevent it.
Raising awareness in communities and among parents and caregivers on the rights of children and on the toxic effects of violence against them, as well as helping them find different strategies to manage children’s behavior, are among the recommendations the Know Violence in Childhood report makes.
Tackling hierarchical school systems that allow corporal punishment and other violence such as bullying is another. UNICEF is partnering with school programs to help teachers use strategies that promote better behavior rather than resort to punishment. The organization, a partner in the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, has also developed a program called INSPIRE, which aims to spread awareness around programs that have been shown to work.
And, despite the downside of so many children being online, there is an upside too: technology can also protect children, with online awareness raising campaigns or mobile phone map applications, for example, that can help keep them safe.

Children At Risk From A Known Enemy

You don’t have to be there anymore. Last night, 500,000 people rented a roof over their heads in 57,000 cities through the web. Also, 640,000 homeowners and paying guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco.
It’s a money maker.
A typical South African Airbnb host, who shares space in his home, can make at least R28,000 ($2,000) a year, according to Airbnb data .
“South Africa is currently the largest market for Airbnb in Africa with 9,400 homes listed. South Africa is becoming an increasingly popular global destination, with the number of people staying in places booked through Airbnb in South Africa increasing by a staggering 257 percent. South Africans are embracing the service as well, with those using Airbnb to travel increasing by 163 percent,” said an Airbnb report last year.
“Airbnb is the worst idea that ever worked,” says Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb.
That’s not all.
On the internet, everything is for hire and anyone can make money. It is called the sharing economy. It allows people to make money from under-used things. You can rent out your house while on vacation, or rent out your lawnmower, piano or  car when not using it. It can be anything.
“I travel a lot and whenever I do, I make sure that my entire house in Stellenbosch is rented out for whatever days I would be gone for. I even let them use my helper if they need to and sometimes I even leave them my pets at an additional cost,” says Jean van der Merwe, a sharing economy devotee.
“I also rent someone’s house instead of a hotel when I’m away. This means I get to feel at home and experience the city like a local would at a cheaper fee.”
Van der Merwe says she rents musical instruments for her children, instead of buying.
“Children change their minds. So I just rent to see what they like and when we are done with it, I just return it to the owner.”
The impact is huge. Airbnb in the hospitality sector; Uber in transport; Spotify in media and Poshmark in fashion are leading the way. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), global revenue generated by this growing phenomenon is expected to be worth $335 billion by 2025.
“We’ve definitely seen a shift in consumption habits, specifically as it pertains to music. People are feeling less of a need to own a track of music, which is where Spotify comes into play. They would rather rent or share things instead,” says Amanda Havey, Vice President of On-Air and Brand Creative for VH1.
For Uber, the sharing economy has brought remarkable growth. Since 2013, the online ride-sharing company has taken off in 12 cities in sub-Saharan Africa, with no advertising. Its disruptive nature and low prices has put it on everyone’s lips. It connects customers through a smartphone app that tracks the journey. Leaked financial results show that the company had gross bookings of $3.63-billion in the first half of 2014 alone.
These figures can’t be ignored. But there is a trick to it. It works on trust and reputation. If you hire out your car, you trust someone will bring it back, in good condition.
According to a PwC survey, 51% of people surveyed say they can see themselves being providers in the sharing economy in the next two years, while 72% say they can see themselves being consumers in the sharing economy in the next two years.
“A potential Uber or Lyft driver, weighing the costs of a new car, may choose to spend more for a higher quality, more luxurious vehicle, knowing that it can yield return on investment rather than simply being a depreciating asset. A prospective homebuyer may look into purchasing a three-bedroom home rather than a two-bedroom, mindful that rental income from a spare room can cover the additional mortgage payment,” reads the study.
It sounds almost socialist in nature, but some argue that it leaves a bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots.
In Uber’s case, little by little, the dream of dominating the taxi ranks of the world is crumbling in Africa. For a start, many drivers complain they are exploited. Angrily, they have joined the South African Transport and Allied Workers’ Union (Satawu) and plan to take the company to the Labour Court – the antithesis of Uber’s free market philosophy. That could be a stumbling block in the sharing economy utopia.
The dispute is over Uber taking a cut from every trip; 20% for UberX and 25% for Uber Black.
“I joined Uber because they promised [we could] be our own boss and get a chance to earn up to R10,000 ($700). We have to work long hours for little income. The cost of living is too much, we’re not benefitting from Uber. They just came to Africa to abuse Africans,” says Joseph Munzvenaga, an Uber driver in Cape Town, who has been driving for the company for more than two years.
Julian Wenn, another Uber driver in Cape Town, says exploitation is an understatement.
“When people are desperate they will do anything, when a firm like Uber has you tuned into the channel of desperation you are bound to be exploited. The sad part is most drivers still don’t realize just how much they are being exploited,” he says.
What may stand up in the court, for the defence, in the sharing economy spirit, is that Uber classifies its drivers as independent contractors and not employees, hence they can avoid paying insurance and other costs companies cover for employees.
Uber spokesperson, Samantha Allenberg, says all drivers are independent operators and are free to work when they want.
“Uber is not a taxi, nor is it a taxi or transportation company. Ridesharing apps like Uber make it affordable and more efficient for riders to get around – especially in places where there is little public transport,” says Allenberg.
This paragon of the sharing economy is also controversial.
The Kenya Taxi Cab Association called for a withdrawal of Uber in the East African country, citing the lack of regulation. The call came on the day violence flared, in the capital Nairobi, as taxi drivers attacked Uber drivers. The association’s organizing secretary, Job Nzioka, says Uber is cheaper because they are not subjected to hefty levies, such as inspection fees, parking fees and operating fees.
In the midst of blood and chaos, investors think that Uber will not just survive, but thrive. They have put their money to drive Uber’s valuation up to $68 billion; much higher than Facebook when it was six years old. Uber has also launched UberEATS, an on-demand meal delivery service powered by its app.
Despite its troubles in Africa, Uber’s ambition is to be ubiquitous, just like many sharing economy companies.
It seems the sharing economy is too big an opportunity to miss.

What’s Mine Is Yours,  For A Fee

When Mike Lawrie fretted and sweated to connect Africa to the internet he expected a handful of dusty academics to use it. A quarter of a century on, African truck drivers, domestic workers and office clerks can’t live without it – the internet in Africa is as much a part of living as is breathing for millions.
“We know internet use in most of the continent has been growing. But it’s not even. So you have countries like South Africa and Kenya on the one hand where many people are using the internet. Then you have Ethiopia, the second largest population in Africa, and very few use the internet,” says Indra de Lanerolle, head of the South African Network Society project at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg.
De Lanerolle is the author of The New Wave, a paper released in 2012 that looked at the internet users of Africa.
“The internet has grown, but there is one thing that hasn’t… fixed lines. Traditionally you would connect with a PC. But only two percent of households have a fixed line. PC penetration hasn’t been going up much. In that context it’s not surprising that it leaves us with mobile and mobile devices.”
“It’s a success story in one way that this infrastructure works. But it’s also evidence of a failure in another. Many African countries have failed to deliver those other networks, or they are way too expensive.”
Internet on the move is expensive. Net costs are high, which means the poor, without PCs, surf less.
“You are buying data in sachet size bytes, 5MB at a time, and you are rationing yourself. Our research shows you are very biased against services when you know how much data they use. One of the good things about Facebook is lowering the data consumption in order to use it.”
Internet means economic growth, says Ibrahima Guimba-Saidou, Senior Vice President Commercial Africa at SES.
“According to our research, if a developing nation has 10 percent more broadband connectivity, it results in a 1.38 percent GDP growth for that country. It is expected that Africa’s population will double to 2.4 billion people by 2050. In 20 years, the number of cities in Africa with over 10 million inhabitants will double. Remote areas are pulling African economies down. Today, over 300 million Africans live more than 50 kilometers from the nearest fiber or cable broadband connection – 400 million people have no internet access at all, that’s 700 million unconnected people. This equates to 60 to 70 percent of the African population living in remote areas, cut off from the bigger cities without access to information and the necessary facilities required for sustainable growth. These people, by no fault of their own, are pulling their country backwards as they are not able to contribute to the economy, as much as they no doubt would want to,” says Guimba-Saidou.
Language is also a barrier, says De Lanerolle. The language of technology tends to be in English, French or Portuguese, making it difficult for those who don’t speak them to navigate on their phones.
“At a bank machine you can get numerous languages but on an app its less. In general e-commerce is generally English in South Africa. If I am a Sepedi speaker in Polokwane, and I go to a shop, I can probably speak Sepedi to a shopkeeper. I can use Sepedi to transact. I can go to a post office and do the same thing,” says De Lanerolle.
“There are a lot of people in South Africa who do not read and write English easily. It’s a significant barrier, but is a solvable one. People, who design services and content, need to take account of that, especially when you have got these limits when you have reached the limit of your clientele.”
Internet users on the continent may be on the rise, but almost half the population lives below the poverty line. According to De Lanerolle’s research, in 2008, one in seven people in South Africa were online. In 2012, this grew to one in three. By 2016, there could be as many as two out of three, he says.
The research bears out that the younger you are, the more likely you are to use it. Almost 50% of those under 25 are internet users, while less than 20% older than 45 use the net. Businesses need to be cautious when it comes to developing apps.
“When people are launching the business they say let’s design an app for an IOS system. First, ask why do an app? If your target market is a low-end income user, they are most likely using a BlackBerry. Why use smartphones?”
“Research, from the US, shows that most users use only 10 apps. It’s quite hard to develop an app that is quite easy to use. More seriously, it’s harder to make an app absolutely necessary that will be in that top 10. Most apps will be used and then dropped in a very short time, like games,” he says.
For those who have dreams of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg and designing a multimillion-dollar app in their garage in Africa, the road may belong and rocky. There is a shortage of developers in Africa, for a start.
“By far our biggest constraint is developers. I was speaking to a CEO of a fairly big company in Sandton; they alone have a hundred vacancies for developers. The problem is we don’t have enough, especially at an entrepreneur level. Because they have such shortages in Sandton, they are offering pretty good salaries. You have to be pretty brave and pretty confident to say ‘screw that I am going to do my own thing and hope I score.’”
Social media is the king of the internet. Seventy five percent of users have at least one account on Facebook, Twitter, Mxit or LinkedIn or other social platforms.
Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at Wits, has taught students to use the internet in journalism for four years. The growing generation of internet users are far less computer savvy than they are made out to be, she says.
“Students these days don’t even know how to burn a CD. I feel like the generation we have now, that deals in apps, don’t learn how to troubleshoot on a computer. Back [in 2000], if you stuffed up on a computer you had to fix it. Even a software error, you had to fix it. Now you just try something else, or reinstall. The way in which we learn about computers has completely changed.”
“I think social media has changed the game for everyone. What’s shifted drastically is initially when the internet came out it was very top down. Those who had power, money and influence were the people producing content. So you had very exclusive content producers. Then you shifted to Web 2.0, where internet users were producing internet content of their own. Now you have moved to a situation where it’s not very clear what production content is. Is a tweet content? Is a Facebook comment content? The individual matters now more than ever.”
The language of computers could be more important than learning Mandarin, she says.
“With me, my general rule with my kids is that they need to read and write properly first and then they can have access to a computer. If you look at people who became tech innovators, they played computer games. People have this aversion and get scared of games and computers, but we should be teaching our kids how to code through games,” says Balliah.
It may be for a privileged few, but it’s clear Africa is set to be changed even more by the growing, dynamic power of the internet.

Eat, Pray, eMail

When Mornay Walters met FORBES AFRICA in 2013, he was the cellphone wielding Jeremiah who warned that your business wasn’t safe from hackers. This was the year when Edwin Snowden, the former CIA employee, blew the whistle on global government surveillance programs. From the streets of Sandton to the stock markets of New York, Snowden revealed that no text, email or Facebook account was safe, unless you had military-style protection.
“You are fighting a shadow war. It could be a kid in a basement or it could be a highly skilled team; you don’t know,” says Walters.
“The reality is communication in the internet has changed drastically from where we were five years ago, to where we were two years ago, to where we are today. Ultimately it’s about one thing, data.”
Walters went into business at the right time, with the right app, to protect classified government installations; he realized he could do the same for businesses. With a team of 15 programmers, he created Seecrypt. It protects metadata, the information embedded in every SMS and email, to make it almost impossible for hackers, or governments, to get your precious secrets.
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Two years on, Walters’ small team of 15 has grown into a $130-million company that is home to 130 geeks; another world for the man who grew up in a Free State farming town that you would struggle to find on Google Maps.
“If you look hard yes, when I lived in Sasolburg the population was only 26 thousand people, today there is only 113 thousand people, 20 years after I left for the big city,” he says.
There are plenty of people to protect: whether it’s Facebook’s 1.49 billion users; WhatsApp’s 800 million users; Twitter’s 316 million users; or Instagram’s 300 million users.
“Personal data is the new black gold,” says Walters.
“You don’t know what you have until you’ve lost it. Ask any A-list celebrity what’s the first thing they want back, privacy… We can tell you horror stories about the perceived way how they take information from you, how they can harvest your address book for example. Listed companies have made billions, yet don’t charge a cent for their product. One has to ask where the money comes from, is your privacy worth the price of your app?”
Think of the app like armor-plating on a Range Rover, says Walters.
“The smallest grain of information that leaks out of that process could affect what we have… Every night, we have what we call sweep attacks. It could be a kid, an automated bot, or a person that hits our system. We spend an enormous sum of money on unified threat management. We do our own penetration tests.”
“We see it as flattering. We are getting interest from the US and China. Literally every modern nation is tapping on our front door or poking us from the side.”
Believe it or not, the company also encourages the people they want to crush.
“We have what we call honeypots, where we trap hackers, and they think they are getting into the system, so we can learn more about them,” says Walters.
So even if you are shopping in Africa, look over your shoulder, he warns
“Credit card SMS notifications can betray you. With SMS notifications you can track someone through a shopping mall. But that information is sent in the non-secure to me. If you are a high-end user, then these texts could make you a potential target. They display bank balance, your name and location. It’s a problem.”
“That’s the thing about cybercrime. It’s invisible. It’s only when I use your information publically against you that you will find out about it. While tech is making our lives easier we are exposing ourselves in a glass box. You are literally walking naked in the streets.”
Whether it is on your child’s Xbox or their cellphone, Walters believes access to the internet is an integral part of our lives, like oxygen and water.
“Your TV has a camera on it; your Xbox has a camera on it. It’s been demonstrated that one can be hacked and you could see into a living room. These things most people are oblivious to. We don’t even realize it,” he says.
It’s a thriving business that has taught the international market never to underestimate an Afrikaans accent from the Free State.
“We are dealing with customers who have never dealt with South Africa. We are naturally underdogs&#8230; The benefit of South Africa becoming the next Silicon Valley is that we’re cheap. We can develop software cheaper and pay developers more,” he says.
“I spend more time in an airplane than at home. But we are so excited about the opportunities coming our way; we expect to become a 500-man company in the next two to three years. It’s not an easy road. But we have made some good impressions.”
Walters’ business is a far cry from the start-up app run by a crew of 15. His next stop: becoming th

Making Millions From Paranoia

On any given day, you can find Mike Lawrie sitting on the patio with a cup of tea in his hand or watering his plants. His wife, Christine, plays scrabble on Fridays. He prefers to dress in khaki shorts and a cotton shirt in the summer heat. This is the 75-year-old who brought the internet to Africa, making it possible for kids, and their parents, to watch movies, play games and surf the World Wide Web from their homes.
His vigour as the father of the internet in South Africa is reflected in his twilight years. He also brought the internet to this retirement village in Pretoria where he is teaching his neighbors how to use their cell phones.
“We’re having a whale of a time doing it. It’s keeping me busy. But today for the first time, one of the old ducks came with a Samsung S4. She’s got a grandchild who lives here with us, and he knew exactly how to use this phone. This kid can’t be 10 years old. It’s fantastic. If I told this kid, 10 years before you were born, there was no internet, he would look at me and say ‘what the hell are you talking about?’”
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When the sun was high on this summer day, the friendly and polite Lawrie offers a glass of iced water and biscuits on his shady patio, ringed with dozens of succulents in pots.
Lawrie’s journey begins in Cape Town where he grew up with a flair for mathematics and science. He struggled to find a job, until he turned to punched card machines, the primitive form of computer programming.
“It was the early computer stuff. Ever wondered why there are 80 columns on a screen? It’s from the punch card system,” says Lawrie.
Along came 1962. Computers were into their second generation and were a little smaller; they could now fit into a lounge, recalls Lawrie. He was one of the few people in South Africa who could work on them.
A purchase made by Rhodes University of an ICT 1301, in 1965, changed everything for Lawrie. The computer had to have a technician. It meant 25-year-old Lawrie moved to Grahamstown, from Cape Town, with his wife, on her 21st birthday, to babysit the ICT 1301 at the university’s computer lab.
“You had to rattle electronic circuits to check for faults. You hit it with a hammer… tap, tap, tap… if the computer still runs it means there is nothing wrong and you move onto the next one. They made them to last. It was a great machine to work on. It taught me computing through and through. These days techies haven’t got a clue about how a machine works.”
The backwater could’ve been the last place you would expect a computer techie to thrive, but Lawrie did.
“Grahamstown has no great industries. It has no electrical noise. Electrically it’s a quiet town. We arrived in November and came back to Cape Town in December, and told people about this pokey little town. The next year we went home, to Cape Town, the same streets you have lived in all your life now looked narrow.”
To say Lawrie is a mere techie is an understatement: he brought the net to Africa, as an experiment, in his own time.
“The doing of it was pure technical. It was fun, it wasn’t a project. It wasn’t our job at the university to specifically do it. It was never part of the reports for the university. The main thing was to run a computer service in the university. Low and behold we tweaked the system and got it working.”
Lawrie took the first step in  linking the world in Grahamstown. With 100 meters of copper wire he set up a primitive computer network that connected the physics department to the university mainframe. He then tried to connect something a bit farther, his house, two kilometers away.
“We found out that if you take two wires from Telkom, then the South African Postal Service, you can put five volts in this side you get five volts on the other end. If you jumper it, [the computer] thinks a modem is connected to the other end.”
By 1985, Lawrie developed an internal email system. Academics could now speak to each other on campus through their computer. Its commonplace now, science fiction then.
The next phase took three years, Lawrie wanted to connect to other universities. The issue was some used IBM computers; the university used a VAX operated computer.
“Low and behold we got the thing to work, using IS protocols. This was magic, connecting two independently controlled computer systems. By 1988, we could take a VAX computer, take an email, put it into our homegrown system, pull it out again, pull it through a sausage machine and then make it an IBM mail and send it off to Potchefstroom,” he says.
It dawned on Lawrie that the system had the potential to send an email around the world.
Lawrie contacted a network called Bitnet that agreed to let South Africa join their network. But, he first needed to get approval from Uninet, run by the CSIR, the government research facility that spearheaded network projects in South Africa.
“I took this proposal to the board, and the board laughed me off. They said I was out of my mind, because Bitnet is run by countries that have a stance against apartheid and would be shut down.”
“I was cheesed off and I don’t get cross that easily. I decided the best thing to do was never to go to a committee again. It’s so easy for a group of people to say it can’t be done.”
Lawrie found an alternative solution in FidoNet, a TCP/IP freebee package designed by Randy Bush in Oregon, in the United States (US), which was smuggled into South Africa on a floppy disk by a friend named Pat Terry.
“This was luck beyond belief,” says Lawrie.
With floppy disk in hand, Lawrie also needed to negotiate an account with the University of Delaware to give him access to the internet. From his computer in Rhodes, Lawrie was able to send mail to Delaware, to Bush in Oregon, to a Unix system, and then over FidoNet.
“The point about the FidoNet was in the testing phase of getting ‘some’ form of international email to work prior to releasing the email service for general use to Rhodes staff and students. This testing was in 1988, the service to Rhodes folk was operational early in 1989.”
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“We are now at the point where I can sit at home and I can log into our mainframe, create mail and send it to someone in the US. You would sit at eight o’clock at night and type an email out to this guy, he doesn’t know when it’s written, and writes back. In his email he invites me to come to this conference saying he wants me to come and talk about what we are doing. I then reply back and say great. He then writes back, how did that mail get here so quickly? How could the interchange of email to Africa be so quick? It was like instant. This guy was expecting to get a response from me in three weeks and he got it in about two minutes. This opened eyes all over the place.”
On November 12, 1991, at 10.44AM, Lawrie set up the first permanent link to send mail, via file transfer protocol (FTP), it was a long walk to the internet for Africa.
“He’s quite an anomaly. Even at that time he was a visionary,” says Dinesh Balliah, New and Social Media lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand.
In 2003, Balliah came across Lawrie when reading archives for her master’s degree.
“I found on the internet a bunch of usenet groups, which were archived, by whichever browser was there back then. They were literally archives of text messages sent by individuals over the internet.  One of them related to South Africa. It related to the original internet work that existed in South Africa at that. I became interested in following this trail, it became a forensic trail. I picked up people’s names and eventually it led me to Rhodes University where the network was started.”
All roads lead to Rhodes. At the end was a meeting with Lawrie and two days of lessons in internet history. It prompted Balliah to write a book on the history of the internet in South Africa.
“I’ll never forget he told me once ‘Everyone at a university complains about how students are only downloading porn, and I look at them and say at least they reading something’. It’s always been his approach. He will complain about how much students consume data, but his approach is let them just play,” she says.
Back in the retirement village, Lawrie is as happy as an email on a server. He presides over the most internet savvy retirement homes in the country.
“What was I driven by? I don’t know. It wasn’t a pioneering nature. It definitely wasn’t the politics of it that motivated it. What’s this concept of emails and why would one want to sit at a computer, type something in and see it somewhere else. How do you go about selling something in a world that doesn’t use email? So I didn’t set about selling it. I set about making it work,” says Lawrie.
You can take the technician out the computer lab but you can’t stop him from joining the dots.

Once Upon A Time There Was No Internet…

When you come home after a long day at work, wouldn’t it be nice to just relax in the living room and savor your Friends reruns on Netflix, or just listen to your favorite playlists, saved on your smartphone over wireless speakers? And if you feel like continuing Friends in your bedroom, just take your tablet and pick up where you left off.
Now that Netflix has expanded globally, including Africa, you can do just that when you get home from work. Video-on-demand services have become mainstream with ShowMax leading the way with its popular R99 ($6) a month offering since 2015. And most recently, we’ve seen the bigger players launch their own music streaming services, like Apple Music and Google Play Music.
The first thing you need to do is make sure you have a decent net connection. A minimum 4Mbps ADSL line is recommended to stream content properly, with a big enough data cap to get through the month; uncapped is recommended for larger households or heavy users. If you have fiber in your area, sign up immediately. A good tip would be not to stream over 3G/LTE as it is very expensive; to prevent this from happening, enable streaming over WiFi only.
Next, you should trial the services that interest you. If you’re looking for TV series and movies, you can take a look at the following VOD services: Netflix, ShowMax or MTN-owned VU.
A basic Netflix account in South Africa costs R129 ($8), and catalogues differ vastly across regions. Another option is ShowMax, which offers offline play, handy if you find yourself traveling and need to catch up on TV. If you’re an MTN customer, the advantage of signing up with VU is that the data for streaming over 3G is zero-rated, meaning it’s free. You can subscribe for a weekend pass for R39 ($2); a month-to-month for R99 or just rent movies from R15 ($1) upwards. Make use of free trial periods to gauge how much data you use, or how long it takes to buffer.
If you’re undecided about which service to choose, check with your partner or family on what shows interest them and who offers a wider selection to cater to everyone’s needs.
If music helps you unwind in the evenings, you should consider subscribing to a music streaming service, because nobody actually buys music anymore. You can subscribe to Apple Music, Google Play Music or Deezer. All three music streaming services will cost a monthly fee of R59 ($3.7), for an individual, and let you stream as much music as you want.
If you’re already an iPhone user, it makes the most sense to subscribe to Apple Music, which has a three-month free trial and a family sharing option. Similarly, if you are on Android, Google Play Music would be the best option.
A unique feature is the ability to upload your own music to Google’s cloud and listen to what’s available in the existing catalogue, plus your own music seamlessly. If neither of these options appeal, Deezer is an excellent alternate, with over 40 million tracks in its library and a 30-day free trial. You can listen to music ad-free on your mobile, laptop or tablet. Choosing the ‘right’ music streaming service all boils down to a matter of preference.
Now that you’ve subscribed to various services, you want to be able to watch TV conveniently in your living room. A great way to start is with a smart TV. Samsung has excellent offerings, as well as LG. Make sure you purchase newer models (2015 and upwards) as they do support apps like ShowMax; and have plenty of ports (USB; HDMI). If you’re splashing out this year, opt for a 4K-resolution TV because you want it to be relevant years down the line.
The best media-streaming device currently is the new Apple TV (2015). You can download apps such as Netflix, YouTube, and even games; and play content wirelessly from an iDevice using AirPlay. You can also play a two-player game of Crossy Road with your child in the evenings. Google’s Chromecast or a Roku streaming device (various models available) are other options if you’re not tied to one ecosystem. All these devices plug into your existing TV, either through HDMI or USB and add another, more user-friendly layer.
Now that you’ve subscribed to various services, having good sound helps you enjoy it a little more. A wireless soundbar is a great addition to your living room. There are various options available from Samsung, JBL, or LG. You can even opt to go with something premium from Bang &amp; Olufsen. There are many options available but the key feature to look out for is Bluetooth or some sort of wireless connectivity to your existing devices, and preferably USB ports; to plug in an MP3 player if the need arises.
A few final touches to your smart living room would be energy-efficient ambient light bulbs that you can control via an app, and air-conditioning. The Elgato Avea bulbs work on iOS and Android and let you choose from different moods (cherry blossom, mountain breeze, magic hour, etc) for different times of the day. Samsung air-conditioners with inverter technology means it consumes less energy while keeping costs down, and you can set timers.
Clearly, it’s time to scrap the morass of wires concealed under duct tape in your living room.

shutterstock_73505923

Inside The House Of The Future

He has more than 190,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel; more than 10 million views and more than 130,000 Twitter followers; 70,000 Facebook subscribers and chances are, you’ve never heard of him. In his own words, “I am a South African teenager who sometimes talks to a camera.” He is, Caspar Lee.
His dry humor tweets range from “I had four too many strawberry milkshakes today” to “If my feet are happy then I am happy” and some which are slightly more risqué. The video content is made up of such simple concepts as babysitting his niece and nephew, prank videos that include getting passersby to send suggestive text messages to friends and a guide on how to be awesome.
“Usually I make videos that I edit and I do funny things in them,” says Lee in one of his YouTube videos.
The 18-year-old matric student, residing in Knysna, South Africa, started making videos in November 2011 out of boredom because he wanted to do more with his spare time. It was then that the self-confessed gaming addict turned to YouTube.
“And then I made another video and another video,” says Lee in his YouTube monologue titled ‘Pro YouTuber’.
“I’d won a competition in which I received R40,000 ($4,600) worth of equipment from Google including a Canon 60D with an L-Series Lens, two studio lights, microphones, stabilizers, other lenses and tripods,” says Lee in an email to me.
Yet, true fame only came when he started collaborating with YouTube stars in the United Kingdom such as Jack Harries (JacksGap), Sam Pepper (OfficialSamPepper), Marcus Butler (MarcusButlerTV) and Alfie Deyes (Pointlessblog).
“I went to England and met some of the best people in the world and they made videos with me,” says Lee.
This was a case of crossover audience marketing at its best. People started subscribing to Casper Lee’s YouTube account and now he is in a position to record his social media videos full-time.
“I’m gaining 1,700 new subscribers on YouTube a day at the moment—that’s more than 50,000 in the past month,” he says.
However, the story is so much more lucrative, as there are some economic rewards that come with online fame.
“Most people don’t know how lucrative YouTube is for the top 1,000 channels. It is a full time gig! Not only do you get paid to make videos on YouTube, you also get paid for all the other things that go along with it such as selling T-shirts, broadcasting live webcam shows, sponsorships, and so much more! It is so exciting,” he says.
Although he was hesitant to reveal how much he is earning to justify being a full-time YouTuber, Lee assures me that the top YouTubers are making a small fortune through shared advertising revenue models with YouTube and promotional work.
With YouTube comments galore from adoring fans which run along the lines of “How do you make your hair all sexy like that?” and “Hi, my name is Alison and I’m a unicorn,” it becomes quite evident that Lee is a hit with the ladies or just a hit in general with those who enjoy an energetic youngster from the Western Cape. In Caspar’s opinion, 99% of the things that go viral are either really funny, really sexy or really cute. The formula has proven to work for him.
Social media tends to be a bit like compound interest. The more followers you have, the more you are bound to receive. When asked about the secret to his fame, Lee enlightens me that it has something to do with being South African, which is a rarity on YouTube and the fact that he is very open and genuine.
With all this social media traction, not seen by some of the country’s biggest media and celebrity brands, what could marketing professionals and brands learn from Caspar Lee?
“I see so many marketers and brands automatically sharing everything they do and it just becomes irritating. Less is definitely more when it comes to social media. I don’t really follow any brands unless they’re funny because if I want to buy one of their products I’ll research it myself rather than having them shove their products down my throat every five minutes,” he says.
There is no talk of university degrees or studying in the near future. He plans to move to London in 2013 to become a professional YouTuber, or in other words, to record himself, in a room, upload it onto YouTube and make money through endorsements and advertising whilst entertaining a new following of people, that have subscribed to his accounts, since you started reading this article.

YouTube Me

Take a minute to think back to your college days. A number of lectures a day; frequent trips to the library; many hours spent studying; countless exams and a bit of a social life here and there. Now, throw creating a web browser into that mix. Impossible, you say? Well, not according to 21-year-old Raindolf Owusu who has done just that by successfully launching a web browser specifically customized for Africa’s growing internet users.
Owusu, a very agreeable computer science student at Methodist University College in Accra, Ghana is talk of the town. As I walk through the halls of his fine institution with him on an overcast morning, his peers acknowledge him with a little hail and respectful handshake, while his cellphone rings intermittently. That is business calling because when classes are over, it’s back to being a software developer and CEO.
“I believe software can solve many problems in Africa. Our problems on the continent are different and existing software from abroad are not built to suit the African setting. Propriety operating systems are being entrenched into our society and we spend so much money paying for licenses on this software. I decided to build a company that will address this problem and develop homegrown software,” says Owusu.
This decision led to the birth of Oasis WebSoft, a software development start-up, from which Owusu’s Anansi Browser and operating system emerged. Anansi operating system is an openSUSE 12.1 clone OS, that was developed on Linux kernel. This makes it a unique experience for Unix desktop users. It is a general purpose, free operating system. It is virus free too, which eliminates the need to buy anti-virus software and it comes pre-installed with LibreOffice. The beauty of Anansi is that it runs on every type of computer architecture and can be run live on a DVD or CD-ROM, which means you can use Anansi OS and your default OS like using Windows on
your Mac.
“I’m an advocate for free and open-source software,” says Owusu.
The Anansi Operating system, attracted 3,000 downloads within the first two weeks of its launch in July. The numbers have since increased to 6,000 downloads and counting. For Owusu, who describes his programming skills as self-taught, funding for his project did not come easily. A lot of funds were injected into securing an unlimited server to host the OS for downloads. After being granted the Guido Sohne fellowship—named after a late, award-winning software developer—by the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa, more angel investors have since flooded in.
On what makes this a pioneering innovation, Owusu explains, “There are so many Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora and Finnix, currently Anansi has a Gnome 3 desktop environment and we have embedded all the basic system wares and software that will enhance software connectivity.”
He hopes that his plans to run the next updated version of Anansi in local languages and the customization of features, to adapt to a variety of African countries, will bring more revenue in the near future.
Owusu’s Oasis WebSoft might be one of the most promising start-ups in Ghana presently, but his interest in his academics has not been swayed in
the least.
“I am very dedicated to my studies. There is still a lot to learn. It’s all a matter of time management. If it means getting less sleep, I’ll continue to balance my studies and work. I don’t want to become a college drop-out. That is not a notion that should ever be held by any African student. Education is very important.
He currently has a team of five, which he hopes to expand with time.
“Raindolf is very hard working and driven. He is one of the best guys I have ever worked with and I’m very proud to be a part of Oasis WebSoft. I believe we have something special on our hands and we will take the name of Ghana and Africa very far with this,” says Jeffery Aboagye-Asare, one of Owusu’s team members.
“My market is Africa. I believe in Africa. It’s quite astonishing that we are currently getting downloads from overseas but I am not worried about competing on a global stage. I want to make sure that anything I build—my mobile, software and web applications—are built solely for Africa,” says Owusu,  the fourth of six children.
Drawing inspiration from names like Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg— the CEO’s and founders of Google and Facebook, respectively—Owusu has got his finger on the cursor and Africa is waiting on his next
click.

MARK ZUCKERBERG IN THE MAKING

Mara.com is an offshoot project of the Mara Foundation, one of Africa’s largest non-profit social enterprises, which lends support to emerging African entrepreneurs at the forefront of their journey. Mara Online will be the continent’s first online mentorship network and will connect young, budding African entrepreneurs to established enterprises and businessmen.  “Mara.com will be a transformational project and will nurture an ecosystem for African entrepreneurs and youth while improving skills and emerging talent,” says Thakkar.
“The idea for the Mara Mentors site started as an offline venture by Mara Foundation. We mentored 120 companies but felt we could have more impact and reach more people across Africa and other emerging markets. Through this initiative we want to share knowledge and expertise with the next generation of business leaders in Africa. The mentees will be given guidance by some of the brightest and best minds in the industry who have already volunteered to be mentors.”
The Mara.com platform will have three dimensions to it: mentorship, jobs and dating.
Mara Mentors will put young African users in touch with well-established and successful entrepreneurs from across Africa—mentors who will offer insight, expertise and experience into a wide spectrum of industries. The mentors on the network will also provide mentees with access to networks and will transfer knowledge and experience to those who are up-and-coming in order to help them transform ideas into sustainable enterprises. At their own discretion, the mentors can at some point opt to meet in person with the mentees and provide support with funding and infrastructure.
Mara Jobs, on the other hand, will provide a user-friendly platform for employers and prospective employees across Africa to post jobs and resumes as well as to promote careers and employment opportunities across all industries.
“With more than 5,000 people employed across Mara Group’s companies, we understand the difficulties of the hiring process in Africa today. We want to use the knowledge we have gained and give the employers and the job seekers a better user experience,” says Thakkar.
Mara Dating will help young Africans find love and companionship. However, according to the Mara.com team, access to Mara Dating will only be possible after registering with Mara Mentors or Mara Jobs, thus attracting a wide spectrum of youth and inspiring the next generation of African entrepreneurship.
The website is being developed by designers and programmers in Silicon Valley, Bangalore, London, Dubai and a few cities in Africa. It will be free to all users, but the network’s complementary jobs and dating sites will utilize third party advertising and other revenue-generating models to financially support the platform. In addition, revenue generated from Mara.com will be channeled to the Mara Foundation towards financing its other social enterprise initiatives such as the Mara Launchpad (a group of business incubation centers across Africa), Mara Launch Funds (which provides small start-up funding for small businesses and start-ups across Africa) and the Mara Entrepreneurship Academy.
Thakkar tells me Mara.com will kick start some innovative initiatives. Considering that Africa is transiting from personal computers to smartphones, the website will base its foundation on mobile and feature phones to fully get adopted by the target audience. Mara.com is currently launching in Nigeria, but the platform will go live globally in December.
Thakkar started trading computers at age 14, after immigrating to Uganda following his escape from the 1994 Rwandan genocide with his family. He parlayed that small computer trading operation into a pan-African conglomerate, the Mara Group, which has interests in everything from real estate and tourism to financial services, information and communications technology, renewable energy and manufacturing, with revenues of around $100 million. Through his Mara Foundation, he says he gives back millions of dollars annually towards grooming and mentoring young African entrepreneurs.
“With Mara.com, I want to ensure that other successful African business leaders have a platform to groom and support young African leaders,” says Thakkar.
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ADAPTED FROM AN ARTICLE ON FORBES.COM

Africa’s First Online Mentorship  Network Is Born

As my car comes to a halt at a red traffic light, the newspaper vendor approaches, waving the latest broadsheet.
“Take one,” he pleads. And when I decline: “How about some change so I can eat tonight.”
Thabo Dube has been selling newspapers on one of Cape Town’s main traffic intersections for more than a decade. But in the past couple of years, he has fallen on hard times.
“I used to be able to make a living from this job, but now I also have to beg to make ends meet,” sighs the lanky father of three, as cars speed past.
As a newspaper salesman, the 43-year-old doesn’t earn a fixed salary. Instead, he buys a stack of newspapers at a reduced vendor price each dawn and takes home whatever profit he makes from sales that day. If he can’t sell the whole stack, he barely cuts even. Some days, he makes a loss. Dube is feeling what many international media experts have been preaching over the past few years—print is becoming an endangered species. The future of news is digital. Instead of buying a daily newspaper or taking out a subscription, more and more people read news on the internet, tablets or their mobile phones.
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It all began in the United States and Europe where the growth of the internet and mobile media access has already sparked the demise of the news industry as we know it. Traditional print media are struggling to make profits. Countless newspapers and magazines have had to lay off staff. Some publications have gone out of circulation. Although African print media have not yet experienced the same slowdown, they are on a straight path towards digital media consumption, experts say.
“The way people consume media in Africa will change dramatically,” predicts Justin Arenstein, manager of the African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC), an internationally-funded initiative that sponsors digital media projects on the continent and consultant to the world’s top search engine provider, Google, as well as the Knight Foundation, a US-based foundation that supports innovative journalism.
What is a fact in the States and Europe is becoming equally true for Africa. Today’s consumers don’t go to a single place for their news. They prefer to access information in ways most convenient to them: by scanning through different sources of content digitally, reading bits and pieces from various publications instead of reading one newspaper indiscriminately from front to back. Readers don’t want editors and journalists to tell them what’s pertinent any longer; they would rather search for specific sites and content that is relevant to their lives, depending on what topics or geographic areas interest them most. That’s especially true for the tech-savvy, digitally literate young generation that demands content to be audio-visual rather than printed black on white.
Print publications in Africa have started to feel the pinch.
“Newspaper and magazine sales are dropping. Publishing houses need to understand why and come up with alternative solutions to maintain a healthy revenue stream,” suggests Dawn Rowlands, CEO for sub-Saharan Africa at digital communications group Aegis Media. There is only one solution to prevent losses, she says: “Print needs to evolve to content provision.”
That means getting content to people should take priority, while the platform used to reach readers is secondary.
That’s easier said than done. The convergence from print to digital has been, and still is, a difficult road for most print media houses. Although newspaper owners realize they have to expand their business model to include digital media, they are not too sure how to make it work and how to monetize it. There is also a great reluctance to change, despite the fact that profits are tumbling. Most publications’ attempts to keep up with the digital revolution have been half-hearted, defensive and often even arrogant.
“It’s a head-in-the-sand approach. Although many African newspapers have developed an online presence it has financially not been that successful,” says Rowlands.
The focus remains on print, with online editions being the poor, low-quality cousins.
In the long run, ignoring the digital trend will not pay off, Rowlands warns. Although people may continue buying a newspaper on a weekend for a leisure read, she is convinced that print media as we know them will vanish within the next decade. The lesson for many print media houses will therefore be a tough one: those that don’t adapt will die.
“Eventually we will see the death of traditional print media in Africa, maybe in the next 10 years,” predicts Rowlands.
Only media houses that reconsider how they approach consumers and that reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms, such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices, will have a chance of survival. Learning from the progressive downfall of print media in the States and Europe is a good way to stay ahead of new developments, experts suggest. No need to reinvent the wheel.
“If African media take heed of what’s happening up north, of what hasn’t worked and where the pitfalls are, they have a good opportunity to build something great,” says Arenstein.
Unsurprisingly, owners of print media hold a more moderate view. Print is far from being dead, insists the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). Contrary to conventional knowledge, newspapers remain a large and thriving industry worldwide, despite the rise of digital media: between 2005 and 2010, daily newspaper circulation in Africa rose a whopping 30%, according to WAN-IFRA statistics.
Another study on “The Future of Print Media”, conducted by US publication Capstone Report, states that the “death of print” remains a limited phenomenon in Africa… for now. In 2011, print circulation in many markets on the continent was stable or slightly up, in part because of rising literacy levels. Literacy—which increased by more than 12% in the past decade among African adults—usually leads to a boost in disposable income and this creates potential new newspaper audiences.
But despite relatively upbeat current data, experts warn the respite won’t last long. Even though African news markets have not fully matured yet, they will be faced with similar challenges to the States and Europe in the next 10 to 20 years, cautions the Capstone Report. Already, African audiences are moving online at a remarkably high speed. The common challenge for print media hence becomes trying to keep up.
The good news is that the predicted death of print does not equal the death of journalism or quality content. People will always want to read good content. What will change is where and how they want to read it. In Africa, mobile news delivery—and not website-based delivery like in the States and Europe—appears to be the medium of choice.
“Consumers in Africa leapfrog. They don’t follow the same path as Europe and the United States,” agrees Rowlands.
She believes the next few years will show huge change on the continent as prices of internet connectivity and technology come down, with smartphone penetration on a rapid increase. This means that people all over the continent have more access to digital news and social networking tools.
Platforms like smartphones and tablets are the future of publishing in Africa because they allow people to look beyond national borders and access the content they want, when they want.
“The appetite for online content is growing because people like to go online to find alternative content that they can’t necessarily buy at their local newsstand,” says Susan Hansford, business development manager at South African publisher Primedia Online.
“People love technology. It’s going to move really quickly. Some experts predict smartphone prices will drop to $20 within the next five years,” says Rowlands. In countries like Kenya or Nigeria, China-produced replicas of Apple iPhones are on sale for a mere $40—nearly half the price of an original iPhone.
Although $40 is a lot of money for an ordinary person living in Africa—in Kenya, for example, the average monthly income is about $60—increasing numbers of people save up for a mobile phone with advanced functionality, especially as prices for 3G and data bundles drop.
“Comparatively speaking, smartphones are not that expensive anymore. For someone living in a rural area, for instance, using a smartphone is often a more affordable and effective way to communicate with the outside world than the money and time it would cost to use public transport [to meet someone in person]. The argument that technology and connectivity are too expensive is a red herring,” says Arenstein.
In some parts of the continent, the digital revolution has already started. Kenya and Nigeria are fast becoming hotspots for digital media uptake and development. In both countries, mobile phones are increasingly used as the primary transactional device for news gathering, communication and banking. Mobiles are also used for other data sharing, like news and information about election monitoring, disease outbreaks, stock exchange fluctuations or weather forecasts for farmers.
Being at the forefront of the digital age has not happened by chance. Both the Kenyan and Nigerian governments have invested in digital development as part of their economic growth strategy by opening up competition in their telecoms and data sectors. This has forced mobile providers to lower the cost of their services, thus ensuring that larger parts of the population can access them. Both governments have also pumped resources into IT skills development so that their own population can develop new platforms, instead of having to hire foreign skills or relying on innovation buy-in from the developed world.
Private businesses in both countries have become keenly aware of the need to invest in digital content. Kenyan media houses, for example, formed a national digital journalism task force earlier this year aimed at developing a nationwide data-driven digital news model that will help the country’s media industry stay up to speed with new technologies.
The impact of what is happening in Kenya and Nigeria reaches beyond their borders. Kenya, for instance, is building a regional hub of technology and media innovation with its east African neighbors Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. Nigeria is doing the same in West Africa, to a lesser degree, by cooperating with Ghana.
“Change is coming, and we must be prepared for it. Technology always wins, no matter how much you fight it. So instead of resisting it, the print media must devise a way of embracing it. When television came, we all thought it would sound the death knell of the radio, since it is capable of capturing sound and picture. But television has not displaced the radio. Instead the two have been complementary,” says Nigerian Broadcast Production Services CEO, Tolu Ajayi, at a recent panel discussion about the future of the country’s print media.
At a slightly slower pace, Egypt, Tunisia, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania are developing into digital hubs. Angola, Mozambique and Zambia also experience massive digital growth, even if those countries are still at the infant stages of digitization.
“They are big markets that navigate away from print, even though their media mix is currently less focused on smartphones,” says Rowlands.
For now, people here consume news mainly via mid-range mobile phones, such as WAP-enabled phones with internet access or handsets with radio access. They also increasingly use text-messaging services to access news and information.
“From Zimbabwe in the south to Senegal in the north, using mobile for content exchange, for business or private use, is starting to have a massive impact on people’s lives,” says Arenstein.
Only countries with poor IT infrastructure, like those situated in central Africa that remain without direct access to undersea cables, such as Chad or the Democratic Republic of Congo, continue to lag behind.
Surprisingly, Africa’s most developed nation, South Africa, is not at the forefront of media digitization with most of the country’s newspapers lacking investment in new technology.
“I don’t see the same degree of creativity in South Africa [than in Kenya or Nigeria],” says Arenstein, who consults media houses all over the continent. “South Africa needs to catch a wake-up call. It is lulled into dismissive complacency, believing that their [well-established] print media market is too big to fail. Yet [being a developed economy], South Africa almost falls victim to the same market conditions as the US and Europe.”
Arenstein is convinced that Africa’s most southern nation is at a tipping point at which it needs to make a massive switch to mobile media—and it needs to do it fast if it doesn’t want to miss the bus. “Convergence is definitely happening, with or without South Africa,” he warns.
Latest statistics prove Arenstein right—sales of some of the country’s daily newspapers decreased by up to 17% in the past year, according to the South African Audit Bureau of Circulations. This is just the beginning, the bureau warns, as the newspaper industry will further lose to digital products in the next few years.
“We are seeing print publishers either struggle with circulation or circulation is flat,” says Hansford.
But not all is doom and gloom in the South African news market. There is one paper, which has not only kept up with the times but been at the forefront of convergence. The weekly Mail &amp; Guardian (M&amp;G) was the continent’s first news website when it launched its online edition 19 years ago. Today, the M&amp;G is Africa’s first newspaper available on Kindle, apart from the fact that it can also be downloaded onto a rage of other mobile platforms—a tenth of the M&amp;G’s subscriptions are currently for Kindle and iPad users.
“Our strategy is ‘digital first’,” says M&amp;G online editor Chris Roper.
When the M&amp;G launched a new version of its website a few months ago, Roper said its readers increasingly demanded and made use of its multimedia elements, partly because bandwidth constraints are being eased.
“We didn’t do it as a response to slowing circulation figures [of the print publication], but because we believe in innovation, in getting content to people. It’s the news that’s important. The platform is less important. We provide whatever the content demands,” he says.
Multimedia has become a vital component in the creation of news. And so have social media.
“Journalism is becoming more inclusive. The audience also contributes. Today’s readers want much more than simply being presented with content. They want to engage intelligently with the publication, be able to comment, contribute and influence the choice of content,” says Roper.
On the M&amp;G website, readers can comment on articles, are invited to contribute content to a news story or join conversations and debates with journalists on Twitter. As its next move, the paper plans to run an ‘open newsroom’ by making its weekly news diary available online so that readers can make suggestions for what stories should be pursued. The M&amp;G is one of the few South African newspapers whose print circulation numbers have increased.
For many print media owners, one of the biggest stumbling blocks of the digital revolution has been their struggle to come up with new ways to make a profit. Traditionally, print publications make most of their money from advertising—much less from subscriptions and individual sales. But the advertising-driven model is becoming outdated fast as more readers consume digital content. And a new, equally profitable way of attracting advertisement revenue still has to emerge. Initiatives to put up paywalls to protect content have only shown moderate success.
In the meantime, advertisers go where the money is: they are quickly moving from print to online. It’s a vicious cycle. As more readers consume content online, print circulations decrease, followed by losses in ad spending and a slump in profits.
There is an upside, though. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and beginning to offset some of the decline in print. The internet is an attractive medium for advertisers because it allows them to match ads more carefully to different audiences and measure accurately how well their money is spent. Websites can track the exact number of people who have visited the site, clicked on an ad and bought the product. Internet advertising is also seductive because online ad rates are far cheaper.
That’s another reason traditional media are losing out. The ad revenue loss experienced by print is nowhere near making up for the ad revenue gain made by online.
“At no time in the foreseeable future will digital advertising revenues replace those lost to print, making the search for new business models, including paid-for online access for news, a key goal for many newspapers,” says Riess.
Print owners will have to figure out many aspects of their business in a media world where only one thing is certain right now. No matter how long they manage to hold on to their old ways of doing business, sooner or later, they will have to say goodbye to print and hello to digitization.

From Newsstand  To The Palm Of Your Hand

How would Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet have met during the internet era? Would it have been in person, as their eyes met across the dance floor at the Capulet Ball, after he confirmed her location via a foursquare update? Or would he have sent a virtual wink to her BBM, the pin of which he coaxed from a mutual Facebook friend?
In 16th-century Verona, the star-crossed lovers were blamed for being reckless; in the 21st century, their only danger would be the accusation of being anti-social in public, as their thumbs did the talking. Countless hours would be spent sending each other their most flattering, photoshopped images, taken on the beach or a Friday night. These would be complemented with blushing and pouting emoticons and beating hearts.
Juliet’s Facebook status updates would reflect an acute case of infatuation. She would post a YouTube video of Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ on her wall. Her friends would comment: “So, who’s the lucky guy? &lt;3” Her nurse—these days, her life coach—would share a photograph, using instagram, of a sports brand billboard encouraging her to: “Just do it!”
Romeo’s workout video to LMFAO’s ‘Sexy And I Know It’ would be posted on YouTube, in an attempt to impress his new love. It would go viral within a few days. He would have to be fit for the secret balcony rendezvous: he would have to jump her wall and give the security guards the slip.
Meanwhile, lying on her bed, Juliet would use her notebook to dote on her lover’s talents in his flickr albums. While browsing through his professional expertise on LinkedIn, she would receive a BBM text saying, ‘Meet me on your balcony in 10.’ He would be heartbroken about being unable to tag himself “—with Juliet ‘Jules’ Capulet” in his Facebook status. To keep it secret, Romeo would open another Facebook account, with a red Ferrari as his profile picture, under the alias, Italian Stallion. He would use this new profile to stalk her wall and compare himself to photographs of her previous boyfriends.
Tybalt, Juliet’s protective cousin, infuriated with Romeo for sneaking into the Capulet Ball, would challenge him to a duel through Google chat. Romeo would decline, and Mercutio—his right-hand man—would accept the challenge on behalf of the Montagues. It would end in Mercutio’s death. In his final moments, while clutching at his chest, Mercutio would tweet @RoMeo, @JCapulet13 ‘A plague upon both your houses #caughtinthecrossfire.’ He might be re-tweeted by someone caught in the I’m-doing-this-because-everyone-else-is-doing-it sharing trend. Romeo would avenge Mercutio’s death by killing Tybalt. #TybaltRIP. Please retweet!
Lord Capulet would discover the love affair through the iCloud application, which would indicate that Juliet was at the Montague estate. Upon her return, a row would ensue. In a tantrum she would leave to meet Friar Laurence, the spiritual healer slash yoga instructor. He would Google search the name of the best sedative to help her feign death in an attempt to escape a proposed marriage with Paris. He would shun the messenger—who in the original story fails to deliver the message, resulting in Romeo’s suicide—in favor of multiple social media alternatives, in case Romeo’s cellphone were to go through to voicemail.
The friar would spare Paris’ life. While mourning at the Capulet burial crypt, the friar would divert Paris’ attention from Romeo’s presence with his new tablet. “What can’t you do with it?” Paris would ask, as Romeo slipped past to prevent confrontation. While Shakespeare would still be credited for penning the world’s greatest love story ever told, with the help of social media the story would end differently. The lovers’ tragic double suicide would be avoided, hence Shakespeare would have saved the lives of three young people. It would no longer be “a story of more woe” as the happy couple would elope after booking a room in Las Vegas via booking.com. They would, however, have to remember not to ‘Facebook check in’ their location.

How Much do average apps make?

@Juliet: Did My <3 Love Til Now?

The beginning of the new millennium was a perilous time for tech startups. The marketplace teemed with would-be entrepreneurs licking wounds inflicted by the crash and burn of the dot-com bubble. Funding was considerably more difficult than during those heady days when a new breed of internet man—a pioneer, a maverick, and occasionally a fool—could seduce investors in the manner of Scheherazade.
In South Africa, dot-com bubble survivors were numerous and generous with their tales of woe, but another phenomenon was afoot as well: the advent of broadband internet, increasingly becoming more accessible for the man in the street.
Lungisa Matshoba, East London-born and mathematically gifted, was starting a Bachelor of Business Science degree, specializing in computer science and finance, at the University of Cape Town.
“I had decided I would be an entrepreneur by the time I finished my degree,” he says. “I knew the richest people in the world were entrepreneurs and while that motivated me to an extent, over time my drive was less about money and more about wanting to build something.”
The opportunity presented itself in the form of a new technology called Voice over Internet Protocol, or as it’s known by its somewhat sexier acronym, VoIP. Using VoIP, a telephone call is made over the internet as opposed to copper phone lines. It’s considerably cheaper as pricing is not distance dependent. If you are reading this magazine, you’ve probably used Skype—the original VoIP product and still a market leader.
VoIP technology entered the consumer market in 2004, thanks to the introduction of broadband. In South Africa, the cost of communication was depressingly high. Even more so for Matshoba, who was juggling cellphone minutes and beer on a skinny student budget.
The rest, as they say, is history. The company, Yeigo—a Navajo word meaning “with spirit”—was born of the efforts of the five founding members, three of whom remain—Matshoba, Rapelang Rabana and Andrew Snowden.
Matshoba was the brains behind the software, which he developed alongside his team for close to a year, without funding. His ability to keep the remainder of his four-person team, all recent graduates, motivated over that period is testament to the drive of a man who harbors little doubt of the potential success of his idea.
“We got through the year by trusting that by the time the next month came, we would have a working product and be on our way to securing funding.”
In 2006, the company approached a group of angel investors who provided funding on what Matshoba terms “a gut trust” of the people involved and the product.
“Our business plan was raw and unfinished, but we were enthusiastic and I think that counted for a lot.”
The product was released into the market in 2007, aimed at the group’s contemporaries and marketed on a shoe-string budget using social media and Google Adwords. The key appeal for potential customers was that aside from convenience, Yeigo’s product was free.
“We weren’t focused on monetization during the early stages; we were more concerned with gathering critical mass. We used a business model similar to Facebook,” says Matshoba.
Swiss-headquartered telecoms operations Telfree Group Communications, a VoIP operator that services MTN and Vodacom, bought 50% of Yeigo in 2008—just two years after inception.
Telfree re-packaged and re-launched the product into a paying business market. Since then, the nature of the company has changed, focusing on cloud-based telephony services for smaller businesses, which Matshoba says is his way of creating value in the South African market where copper-based telephony remains relatively high.
“A telephony system for a business unit has a flat cost regardless of whether the company employs two or 100 people. Our product basically moves all telephony services into the cloud and customers pay per user and are able to expand gradually as their business grows.”
Matshoba is convinced that the growth of Yeigo, which now employs nine people, is in Africa where he envisions more cloud computing products, aimed at small business, in service sectors broader than telephony.
“We are sitting in a third world environment and not all companies are realizing that we need to adapt first world products and services to suit this market.”

The Cash-Strapped Entrepreneur  With His Head In The Clouds

One morning in mid-August, seven months into the Arab Spring protests and government crackdowns in which thousands have been killed, something strange happened on Syria’s Internet. As users aimed their Web browsers at Google and Facebook, they instead saw a page of white Arabic script scrawled across a black background.
“This is a deliberate, temporary Internet breakdown. Please read carefully and spread the following message,” it read. “Your Internet activity is monitored.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-350" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/FO011612_044.jpg" alt="" width="963" height="768" />
Then the page switched to a white screen filled with instructions on using free encryption and anonymity software like Tor and TrueCrypt to evade surveillance and censorship. Emblazoned above the text was a round, mysterious symbol: a star inside an omega, hovering over a pyramid surrounded by lightning bolts. Below it were written the words: “This is Telecomix. We come in peace.”
Telecomix, a loose-knit team of international hacktivists, had been scanning the Syrian Internet in a massive sweep, dividing 700,000 target connections among its members in Germany, France and the U.S., probing for hackable devices with software tools like Nmap and Shodan. They compromised vulnerable Cisco Systemsproduced network switches to find other devices’ passwords, snooped on open cameras revealing street scenes and even officials’ desks, and at one point retrieved the log-in credentials for 5,000 unsecured home routers, which they used to insert the above-mentioned surveillance warning into browsers across the country.
As the globally distributed hackers combed Syria’s networks and posted their findings in a crowd-sourced document, one American member of the group, who uses the handle Punkbob, spotted a Windows FTP server filled with data he recognized: logs from a Proxy SG 9000 appliance built by the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company Blue Coat Systems. In Punkbob’s day job at a Pentagon contractor, he says, the same equipment had been used to intercept traffic to filter and track staff behavior. The Syrian machine’s logs showed the Internet activity of thousands of users, connecting the sites they attempted to visit and every word of their communications with the IP addresses that pointed directly to their homes. In short, he had discovered American technology being used to help a brutal dictatorship spy on its citizens.
“At first we were just poking around, but when I saw that, I had this feeling of dread,” says Punkbob, who requested that FORBES not use his real name. “To see exactly what Syria was tracking and who was providing the technology to do it.…That was when it felt real.”
Since Telecomix published 54 gigabytes of those logs, the resulting attention has forced Blue Coat to admit that its gear had been used by Syria, a potential violation of international sanctions against that country. The company didn’t respond to FORBES’ request for an interview, citing an ongoing internal review and a related Commerce Department probe. (Note that the investigation didn’t deter private equity firm Thoma Bravo and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan from a recent deal to take Blue Coat private for $1.3 billion.)
The disclosure of Blue Coat’s gear in Syria has touched off revelations that hardware from other U.S. firms, including NetApp and HP, was also used by blacklisted regimes. The industry now faces tough new questions about tech firms’ responsibility for how their products are used—and by whom.
Telecomix sees its Blue Coat discovery as a turning point in the group’s mission: Founded to fight for free speech, it now aims to also expose those who fight against that ideal, including any Western tech firm aiding the wrong side. “I hope that the Blue Coat thing was the start of something much bigger,” says Chris Kullenberg, a lean and lip-pierced Swedish political science grad student at the University of Gothenburg and a Telecomix founder. “The goal is to put political pressure on these companies. It started with rage and frustration. What can we do? Well, we can hack a few boxes and expose this to the world. That’s the motivation that drives hackers deeper and deeper into the networks.”
Telecomix likely broke Syrian law. But some more traditional advocates appreciate their work. “It crosses a line we wouldn’t be comfortable crossing,” says Brett Solomon, president of the digital human rights group Access Now.
“But sometimes it takes someone like Telecomix to put a spanner in the works.”
Actively hacking networks is a new game for Telecomix’s Web revolutionaries, who call each other “agents” or “Internauts.” But unlike the hacker group Anonymous, which began with juvenile pranks before attacking Scientologists, opponents of WikiLeaks and defense contractors, Telecomix was born political. The group was created at a Gothenburg conference in 2009 to oppose the European Union’s so-called Telecoms Package, industry-influenced laws that would have cut Internet access for anyone repeatedly downloading copyrighted files. “In a sense, corporations have always been the enemy,” says Kullenberg.
The hackers dug up and published the phone numbers of every EU Parliament member, then convinced the copyright-flouting Swedish download site the Pirate Bay to post a link on its home page, which received 20 million monthly visitors. The Parliament’s phones were jammed for days, and the statute was eventually dropped.
The populist uprisings of the Arab Spring brought Telecomix’s goals—and its enemies—into sharper focus. A few days into the Jan. 25 protests in Egypt Hosni Mubarak shut down all but one of his country’s Internet service providers. “Telecomix members consider themselves citizens of the Internet,” says one American Telecomix hacker who goes by the nickname the Doctor. “So we took that as a personal affront.” Agents arranged with the hacker-friendly Internet provider French Data Network to fire up modem banks and give users free dial-up connections. Then the group faxed thousands of leaflets to Egyptian universities, offices and cybercafes, explaining how to skirt the blackout.
Telecomix’s scanning of the Syrian Net began as reconnaissance to prepare for an Egypt-style Internet shutdown. Stumbling onto the Blue Coat logs was a fateful fluke. When the hackers realized what they’d found, they downloaded close to 100 gigabytes of data, using the Tor anonymization network to cover their tracks. The process took weeks. In October Telecomix released hundreds of millions of lines of text listing hundreds of sites the Syrian government was blocking, from porn to Facebook to Chat- roulette, along with enough users’ communication logs to show that the regime was using their Blue Coat gear to not only filter but also monitor dissidents’ activities.
Blue Coat’s scandal demonstrates the complexity of regulating surveillance technology. The firm claims it hadn’t known about its devices in Syria, arguing they must have found their way into the country through a reseller in the United Arab Emirates. “Blue Coat is mindful of the violence in Syria and is saddened by the human suffering and loss of human life that may be the result of actions by a repressive regime,” it wrote in a statement. “We don’t want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States.” But critics like cryptography guru Bruce Schneier and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum point out that Blue Coat devices link back to its servers for licensing and updates, implying the company may have turned a blind eye to its Syrian users.
Some Telecomix agents say they’ve also spotted equipment sold by Fortinet in Syria. Fortinet responds that it “has in place a policy prohibiting shipping its product to countries where shipment is embargoed.” And what about resellers who pass it on to those countries? “At that point it’s out of our hands,” a spokesperson says. Hazy as the line may be, it’s clear some companies have crossed it. Marketing documents published by Wiki Leaks show 160 firms advertising surveillance gear, often in Arabic as well as English. British firm Gamma International brags that it can spy on users of Gmail, Skype and iTunes; its sales pitch was found in the files of the Egyptian government after Mubarak fled.
Telecomix is determined to remain a watchdog against Western firms aiding foreign Big Brothers. Two Swedish members, Chris Kullenberg and Jonatan Walck, have registered a site called Internaut.cat where they plan to publish future disclosures of the group’s findings, using Sweden’s strong media laws to shield their sources. “We’re at a point now where Internet users are becoming aware of what’s being done to them,” says the Doctor. “Companies that sell gear designed to track people should expect to be outed.”

Web Vigilantes

Amolo Ng’weno always wanted to be a doctor. But when she went to college, it all changed. At Harvard University in the Unites States, Ng’weno, a then 20-something ambitious Kenyan girl, became fascinated with computers and everything they could do—especially transmitting information. Overnight, she fell for the new, wide world of technology.
“My first experience with computers was at a US trade exhibition when I was in high school, but I didn’t actually get to use a computer until I got to college,” she says.
<div id="attachment_304" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-304" class="size-medium wp-image-304" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Amollo-028-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Amolo Ng&#8217;weno</div>
Luckily, Harvard had a course for every student to learn the rudiments of computers.
“This experience totally changed my perspective on the tools for getting any kind of work done and has shaped my career ever since.”
Ng’weno studied psychology and social relations at Harvard, but the computer bug had bitten and not even a master’s in economics and public affairs at Princeton University, or working for the World Bank would get in the way.
Fate took a hand through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the east coast town of Cambridge. Here, two fellow Kenyans—Ayisi Makatiani and Karanja Gakio—had developed a similar obsession. So, when the three met one evening, breaking bread and sipping black coffee at a small café in Cambridge, the idea of an online news service was mooted. It began on an internet community, hosted at MIT, called KenyaNet. In 1994 it became Africa Online, the internet giant that lives to this day.
“We saw the utility of local news to the African diaspora and we thought the opposite would also be true; people in Kenya would want to communicate with the world and know what was going on internationally,” recalls Ng’weno, who quit as an economist with the World Bank in Washington to help set up Africa Online.
“It was the very early days of the internet in the US and although we were ambitious for our company, we didn’t dream it would change all our lives the way it has.”
As the internet boom kicked off, Africa Online shifted focus from providing news to connecting Africans to the internet. In 1995, it was bought by Boston-headquartered International Wireless, which became Prodigy. That year, Ng’weno was sent to launch the Kenyan operation, becoming the first internet service provider (ISP) in East Africa’s largest economy. A year later, perhaps after proving herself as start-up honcho, she was moved to Côte d’Ivoire to set up a subsidiary.
Africa Online was on a roll. It expanded to Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland, with the three coffee drinkers from Cambridge in charge. It acquired several ISPs, such as Pipex Internet Solution (Swaziland), Net2000 (Kenya), UUNET (Namibia) and Swift Global (Uganda).
In 1998, Prodigy sold the company to African Lakes Corporation, a British investment firm that was diversifying from agriculture and mining. For a while, the company traded on the London Stock Exchange, enjoying favor from investors, then listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange in 2001.
As the new century turned, the internet (dotcom) bubble burst, wiping out many companies around the world and leaving erstwhile eager investors in the red.
“The company needed additional cash for growth which could only be supplied by international investors,” says Ng’weno, who won’t reveal what stake she held in the company, in a country where too much wealth is frowned upon.
“At the same time, the internet bust and investor jitters about Africa had really hammered the share price of our UK parent company, The African Lakes Corporation, forcing its management to de-list from the London and Kenyan stock exchanges.”
In 2001 the three founders exited, with the company firmly in eight countries and the largest ISP in sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa.
<div id="attachment_303" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-303" class="size-medium wp-image-303" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Amollo-035-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Surveying the scene: Amolo Ng&#8217;weno looks over Nairobi&#8217;s bustling city</div>
Six years later, in 2007, South African fixed-line telecommunications company Telkom SA bought Africa Online Limited from African Lakes Corporation for £10.32 million ($15.8 million). The ISP, which had been running at a loss, had just started to make some profit, but it was not enough to raise the necessary capital to take full advantage of the opportunities in Africa’s fast-growing telecoms industry.
Ng’weno left to work for a number of organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now, aged 46, Ng’weno is trying to make a comeback in the industry where she made her name, at a time when many would be slowing down.
In April 2011 she launched a business process outsourcing (BPO) company in Kenya, just a month after leaving Bill and Melinda Gates. Digital Divide Data (DDD) Kenya blends a for-profit technology business with social welfare.
“We’re a social enterprise,” she said recently in an interview at her office on the seventh floor of Paramount Plaza in Nairobi.
“Which means, while we’re a for-profit company in Kenya, we also have a social mission which is to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds a path out of poverty.”
Most of DDD Kenya shares are owned by the US NGO, also called Digital Divide Data (DDD), which received a grant of $895,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to bring its social enterprise model to Kenya. DDD has invested in an information technology services business that targets to train and employ 300 youths from slum areas in Nairobi.
The grant is part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Poverty Reduction through Information and Digital Employment (PRIDE) program. PRIDE is working in Africa to foster and scale up a new arm of the outsourcing industry called “impact sourcing” by supporting projects aimed at creating jobs for the poor.
Ng’weno, who is managing director at DDD, says the organization hires young people from Nairobi’s vast slums to deliver high-quality BPO services. There’s also a team of deaf people working as digital management operators.
“Our staff works with us half day and go to tertiary education the other half day,” she says. “It’s a model that has worked well for DDD in Asia, where our staff typically graduate from their university education, and from the company, after four to five years.  When they graduate, they are on a path to careers in IT and other fields that would have been difficult for them to access without our support.”
From 35 workers at inception, DDD Kenya has grown to more than 100.
“We don’t think profit is incompatible with achieving a social mission. We actually believe the profit motive is an important one—and the only way that we can grow our business sustainably so that we can fulfill our goal of providing employment and career development to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. If we don’t make a profit, we can’t deliver on our mission,” says Ng’weno.
It is this social enterprise that has anchored Ng’weno’s second coming on the internet platform, albeit at a more advanced level. The company is championing digital marketing by helping organizations use the internet to grow their brands and markets. Recently, the company became the first in the region to be certified by Google to offer advisory and technical services for the search engine giant’s AdWords advertising service. Ng’weno says DDD Kenya has a growing number of clients in Kenya drawn from various sectors including tourism, real estate and financial services as well as big clients across Africa and overseas.
Digital marketing covers a broad range of channels marketers can use to communicate with their customers. It could be anything from email, desktop text and banner ads, social media marketing or mobile and text ads.
But it is the banner ads placed on websites that have been attracting the attention of marketers and brand managers lately. With more than 25% of the 44 million people in Kenya online, according to the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK), advertisers are increasingly realizing that they need to fish where the fish are.
“The internet has become an integral part of everyday life in Kenya and Africa and it’s changing the way people work, shop, look for information, communicate and meet people,” says Olga Arara-Kimani, Google Kenya’s country manager.
“This, coupled with the fact that advertisers are increasingly looking for mediums that deliver high, measurable returns on their investment, has led to higher proportions of ad spend going to online channels.”
A number of big businesses in Kenya are advertising online. Kenya has one of the highest internet penetration rates in Africa and emerging markets, currently at 25% and growing at 17% annually. About $8 trillion exchanges hands each year through e-commerce, but only a tiny fraction of that is in Africa. DDD Kenya hopes to increase this figure.
“Because it’s so targeted, this kind of online marketing is cost-effective. Many people want to get into digital marketing because it’s possible to know exactly who you are targeting.”
DDD Kenya recently diversified into electronic books. It is already digitizing reading materials for the government-run Kenya National Library Services, with a number of other projects in the pipeline. It’s betting on e-books and hopes publishers will buy into the idea.
“The Kenyan education system seems to give us a great pool of candidates, despite having gone to schools that are not seen as being high achievers. Our staff speak, read and write good English, which is important for all our international and many local clients.”
Harking back to the days when they set up Africa Online, Ng’weno says technology has come a long way on the continent. The infrastructure has improved dramatically, especially with the arrival of undersea cables.
“However, it’s still not clear to me why the entire internet slows down in the late afternoon (especially on Fridays),” she says.
For Ng’weno, training at Harvard, the world most prestigious business school that has produced some of the world’s biggest entrepreneurs played a part in shaping her into a shrewd entrepreneur. “Harvard is a great place to be challenged and to grow intellectually,” she says. “I’m sure it has contributed to my life in many different ways, which is the purpose of a good university education.”
Tenacity appears to run in the family. Her father, Hillary Ng’weno, was the owner and editor of the Weekly Review, Kenya’s first independent news magazine. He was a ground-breaker in lively and objective journalism. Ng’weno had a degree in mathematics and nuclear physics from Harvard. Fleur, her mother, is a naturalist and expert on bird life. She ran the Rainbow Magazine for children in the 1970s and 1980s.
So what does it take to be a great entrepreneur? Amolo Ng’weno says it is simply taking advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself and surviving disasters, so you are still there to fight another day.
In a patriarchal society like Africa, where men dominate business and leadership, success stories like Ng’weno’s are rare. You may wonder if being a woman has worked against her in business.
“People usually think it would be a disadvantage. But I’d say I was raised to see the potential in each individual, regardless of their sex or social background. And I think that’s what I’ve also found in my dealings with others.”
Tall and endowed with an African female figure, Ng’weno does not cut the image of a tech nerd. She’s easy in her attire and conservative in her use of jargon. Unlike the noisy tech types Ng’weno, who loves horses, talks as if it is not her job to be audible, yours to listen carefully.
On a warm Wednesday in Nairobi, she paces in her hi-tech office to oversee the Kenya National Library Services e-books project is completed on time. She is undeterred by road construction noises outside, which includes a huge trench outside her office building. It means she has to park her car 300 meters away and walk through the mess of rubble, earth, man and machine.
“Right now I’m too busy for hobbies,” she says when asked if she finds time for leisure. “Given the Nairobi traffic situation, maybe I will say, sitting in traffic listening to radio while doing email on my laptop computer. Our car was imported from Japan and can only get two stations so I listen to Ghetto Radio (a Nairobi radio station that broadcasts in local slang known as sheng) a lot.”
To succeed in business, she has learnt to turn what is perceived as her weaknesses on their heads. It all depends on how you look at strengths and weaknesses, she says.
“I am frequently told I’m impatient but I regard this more of a strength than a weakness. Similarly I can be detail-oriented and meticulous, which my staff complain about, but I think I’ve found a line of work in which that is, again, a strength rather than a weakness. Overall, I think most attributes can be strengths in some circumstances and weaknesses in others and the trick is to find the right combination.”
With a meticulous eye for detail backed with zeal for results, it is surprising that a team with Ng’weno on its side could go wrong. Yet, while running Africa Online, she realized that even IT wizards can make terrible miscalculations.
“We had acquired a company in Zimbabwe but we failed to take into account that our corporate cultures were very different,” she recalls. “Their IT people could not get on with our customer service people. Within a month most of their staff had resigned, taking with them most of their customers.”
Africa Online ended up paying money in Zimbabwe but getting next to nothing in return. “This,” Ng’weno says with a shy smile, “was a big lesson in thinking about corporate culture issues.”
Many more big lessons surely await the comeback kid in Kenya’s tough and competitive digital world.
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Tag: Internet

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